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The “joy plant”, a persistant factoïd

In spite of the doubt argued and presented since the mid-1970s, then 80’s, and even more recently, the idea that the poppy was widely used in the Mesopotamian world is still tenacious.

The opium poppy is of interest to several disciplines (medical, anthropology, geopolitics, etc.) and more particularly its use in medicinal or ritual recipes, since the ancient period in the Near East and in the Mediterranean area. It is precisely to illustrate the thousand-year-old narcotic use of the opium poppy that a factoid is still used today in scientific literature.

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